October 5, 2005

A Nickelback of Funk.

With the arrival of football comes a new slate of ads from the big spenders. So there’s Moose, the jolly guy who rented that cool car from Enterprise for his high school reunion and in the process scored with two girls who’d evidently grown up to become mid-grade exotic dancers with a fetish for spangled cocktail dresses. I ain’t sayin’ that they’re gold diggers, but… Anyway, Moose is now David Spade’s Capitol One whipping boy in a campaign so deflated it makes the Energizer bunny look like Chiat/Day and Apple in the 1984 Super Bowl. But for that matter the Bunny’s still going, too. Energizer’s new ad finds him rolling through the sub-Saharan desert while an African marathoner gives chase; in a weirdly racist turn, the footrace is watched by two Colonialist honkies in Orvis safari/explorer wear whose comments and facial expressions suggest that, to them, the runner is no more human than the battery-powered bunny. Way to go, Energizer. Why don’t you hang it up? your batteries suck anyway. In the better column is CPB’s giant plastic head Burger King. In week one he was found running a sweet route down the sideline, catching a pass in stride and streaking into the end zone, pasted plastic smile intact beneath the crown. But he must’ve been injured on the play, because since then the King has been seen visiting hungry lumberjacks in the North Woods and sating them with a gargantuan omelet sandwich that BK describes as “Meat’normous.” Now, as I’ve made clear in the past, as much as I love Burger King’s absurdist turn with their plastic-faced mascot, there’s no way I’m eating at the restaurant. Eating their food is like having a garrote scraped across your stomach, or volunteering your throat as an auxiliary grease trap. But fucking hell does BK have balls. Meat’normous? In one badass word scrunch they’ve admitted their desire to transform America’s arteries into unrecognizable ropes of milky white chum. They’ve flouted superficial humility with one bold flick of an apostrophe, telling all those starving kids in Oombababamau, “Unless you’re a lumberjack, you ain’t eating bitches.” Meat’normous is the “Have a nice day” painted on a 5,000 pound bomb; it’s the Hummer of breakfast sandwiches, the meat + cheese + meat equivalent of consumptive hedonism. And as you're doubled over in pain before its half-eaten mass, the face of David Spade appears in its grayish swirl of eggs and cheddar.

My Morning Jacket have been critical and cult faves since at least 1999, when Tennessee Fire established the Louisville band's rangy blend of country and indie rock. But while the strong ATO release It Still Moves upped their profile, 2005's Z is the platform MMJ centerpiece Jim James' songwriting has been waiting for. The album captures every flicker of the My Morning Jacket sound: epic reverb; ragged southern rock flashes; evocative, curious lyrics; and the intense creativity that keeps them ever unpredictable. Jim James writes dream-pop from the heart of the American south, and Z is his challenge to Jeff Tweedy's Americana throne.